Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Verbatim "Climate" Journalism

By Alan
Caruba

On
September 27 I was reading my Wall Street Journal as usual when I turned the
page to read the following headline: “U.N. Affirms Human Role in Global Warming.” There is no human role in global warming and there is no global
warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past seventeen years.

The
Journal article began “Stockholm—A landmark United Nations report issued Friday
reaffirmed the growing belief that human activity is the dominant cause
because a rise in global temperatures and reiterated that a long-term planetary
warming trend is expended to continue.”

I
concluded that the Journal had fallen into the common error of “verbatim
reporting”, another way of saying that the two reporters bylined on the article
had done nothing more than take the UN news release regarding the “summary
report” of this week’s fifth “Assessment Report” (AR5) from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and then embellished it with a few calls to
people identified as experts or spokespersons.

This isn’t
journalism. It’s public relations. I know because I practiced both of these
magical arts for many years. All governments, all institutions, all
organizations, and all enterprises of every description practice public
relations. The job of journalists, however, is to lend some balance to the
claims or to expose outright lies.

Much to
its credit, a September 30 Journal editorial eviscerates the article, noting
that the IPCC’s latest report is a “flimsy intellectual scaffolding…to justify
killing the U.S. coal industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, banning natural
gas drilling, imposing costly efficiency requirements for automobiles, light
bulbs, washing machines, and refrigerators, and using scare resources to
subsidize technologies that even after decades can’t compete on their own in
the marketplace.”

Every few
years, in order to maintain the fiction of global warming, the IPCC has put out
a report that it claims represents the combined wisdom of several hundred
scientists and others—in this case 800 of them. I suspect that are far smaller
group, a cabal, a coterie, and conspiracy of skilled propagandists actually
write the IPCC reports.

Most
certainly, in 2009 with the online exposure of hundreds of emails between the
so-called climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and others here
in the U.S., dubbed “climategate”, we learned that they had been deliberately
falsifying the outcomes of their computer models and, at the time, were growing
increasingly worried over the obvious cooling occurring.

What was
striking about the totally uncritical Journal article was that even The New
York Times—long an advocate of the global warming hoax—actually took note of
the many scientists who have long since repudiated and debunked it. It reported
that “The Heartland Institute, a Chicago organization, issued a document last
week saying that any additional global warming would likely be limited to a few
tenths of a degree and that this ‘would not represent a climate crisis.’”The Institute has created a website of useful
information at www.climatechangereconsidered.com.

As usual,
one often has to read a British newspaper such as the Telegraph to get the
other side of the story. It, too, took note of the Heartland Institute that,
since 2008, has sponsored eight international conferences that brought together
leading scientists to rebut the IPCC lies. In addition, it has released
“Climate Change Reconsidered II”, a report that disembowels the IPCC’s report.
The Telegraph quoted Prof. Bob Carter, a contributor to the Heartland report,
who criticized the IPCC for its “profoundly distorted” view of climate science,
calling it a “political body” that was “destroying the essence of the
scientific method.”

In a
commentary posted on the widely-visited website, Watts Up With That, by Anthony
Watts, two leading skeptics of global warming, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C.
“Chip” Knappenberger described the IPCC’s AR5 as a “Humpty Dumpty-esque report
once claiming to represent the ‘consensus of scientists’ (that) has fallen from
its exalted wall and cracked to pieces under the burdensome weight of its own
cumbersome and self-serving processes, which is why all the government’s
scientists and all the government’s men cannot put the IPCC report together
again.”

The IPCC
report, said Michaels and Knappenberger, was rendered “not only obsolete on its
release, but completely useless as a basis to form opinions (or policy) related
to human energy choices and the influence on the climate.” They concluded by
recommending that “The IPCC report should be torn up and tossed out, and with
it, the entire IPCC process which produced such a misleading (and potentially
dangerous) document.”

For the
layman who has little or no knowledge of climate science or meteorology, it is
sufficient to know that none of the claims put forth about global warming have
come true. None of the claims being made again will come true. Indeed, given
the cycles of ice ages, the present cooling could turn into a new one.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.